The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#651
Jeff Koons
#651
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.
Go to Profile#652
David Chalmers
#652
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
#653
Manfred Eigen
#653
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Manfred Eigen was a German biophysical chemist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions. Eigen's research helped solve major problems in physical chemistry and aided in the understanding of chemical processes that occur in living organisms.
Go to Profile#654
Ted Hughes
#654
Overall Influence
1930 - 1998 (68 years)
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Go to Profile#655
Fischer Black
#655
Overall Influence
1938 - 1995 (57 years)
Fischer Sheffey Black was an American economist, best known as one of the authors of the Black–Scholes equation. Background Fischer Sheffey Black was born on January 11, 1938. He graduated from Harvard College in 1959 and received a PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1964. He was initially expelled from the PhD program due to his inability to settle on a thesis topic, having switched from physics to mathematics, then to computers and artificial intelligence. Black joined the consultancy Bolt, Beranek and Newman, working on a system for artificial intelligence. He spent a summer developing his ideas at the RAND corporation.
Go to Profile#656
Nel Noddings
#656
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Nel Noddings was an American feminist, educator, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care. Biography Noddings received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physical science from Montclair State University in New Jersey, a master's degree in mathematics from Rutgers University, and a PhD in education from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.
Go to Profile#657
Avigdor Lieberman
#657
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Avigdor Lieberman is a Soviet-born Israeli politician who served as Minister of Finance between 2021 and 2022, having previously served twice as Deputy Prime Minister of Israel from 2006 to 2008 and 2009 to 2012.
Go to Profile#658
Walter Isaacson
#658
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Walter Seff Isaacson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He has been the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Go to Profile#659
Anatol Rapoport
#659
Overall Influence
1911 - 2007 (96 years)
Anatol Rapoport was an American mathematical psychologist. He contributed to general systems theory, to mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of social interaction and stochastic models of contagion.
Go to Profile#660
Oliver Smithies
#660
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Oliver Smithies was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and for the discovery, simultaneously with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, of the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA, a much more reliable method of altering animal genomes than previously used, and the technique behind gene targeting and knockout mice. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for his genetics work.
Go to Profile#661
Robin Milner
#661
Overall Influence
1934 - 2010 (76 years)
Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner. Life, education and career Milner was born in Yealmpton, near Plymouth, England into a military family. He gained a King's Scholarship to Eton College in 1947, and was awarded the Tomline Prize in 1952. Subsequently, he served in the Royal Engineers, attaining the rank of Second Lieutenant. He then enrolled at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957. Milner first worked as a schoolteacher then as a programmer at Ferranti, before entering academia at City University, London, then Swansea Unive...
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Peter Chen
#662
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Pin-Shan Chen is a Taiwanese American computer scientist. He is a distinguished career scientist and faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Distinguished Chair Professor Emeritus at LSU. He is known for the development of the entity–relationship model in 1976.
Go to Profile#663
Boris Yeltsin
#663
Overall Influence
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the first president of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990. He later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism and Russian nationalism.
Go to Profile#664
Gerard 't Hooft
#664
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
#665
Susan Haack
#665
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Susan Haack is a distinguished professor in the humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
Go to Profile#666
Barbara Liskov
#666
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Barbara Liskov is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the introduction of abstract data types and the accompanying principle of data abstraction, along with the Liskov substitution principle, which applies these ideas to object-oriented programming, subtyping, and inheritance. Her work was recognized with the 2008 Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science.
Go to Profile#667
Marshall Sahlins
#667
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Areas of Specialization: Economic Anthropology, Historical Anthropology Marshall Sahlins was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Sahlins earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. Note: Since the publication of this ranking list, Professor Sahlins passed away, April 5, 2021. An activist since the Vietnam War, Sahlins coined the phrase, teach-in, an academic exercise inviting open discourse, barring any limitation on where the discussion may lead.
Go to Profile#668
Robert Hanssen
#668
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Robert Philip Hanssen was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".
Go to Profile#669
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#669
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.
Go to Profile#670
Thomas Friedman
#670
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Thomas Loren Friedman is an American political commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who is a weekly columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues.
Go to Profile#671
Ron Rivest
#671
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Go to Profile#672
Stanley Fischer
#672
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Stanley Fischer is an Israeli-American economist who served as the 20th Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017. Fischer previously served as the 8th Governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005 to 2013. Born in Northern Rhodesia , he holds dual citizenship in Israel and the United States. He previously served as First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and as Chief Economist of the World Bank. On January 10, 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Fischer to the position of Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve. He is a senior advisor at BlackRock. On September 6,...
Go to Profile#673
John Roemer
#673
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John E. Roemer is an American economist and political scientist. He is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Before Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer. He is married to Natasha Roemer, with whom he has two daughters.
Go to Profile#674
Yoshua Bengio
#674
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms .
Go to Profile#675
Paul Sweezy
#675
Overall Influence
1910 - 2004 (94 years)
Paul Marlor Sweezy was a Marxist economist, political activist, publisher, and founding editor of the long-running magazine Monthly Review. He is best remembered for his contributions to economic theory as one of the leading Marxian economists of the second half of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#676
Hunter S. Thompson
#676
Overall Influence
1937 - 2005 (68 years)
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who founded the gonzo journalism movement. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels , a book for which he spent a year living and riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences.
Go to Profile#677
Robert Reich
#677
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.
Go to Profile#678
Melvin Calvin
#678
Overall Influence
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Melvin Ellis Calvin was an American biochemist known for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#679
Peter Blake
#679
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Sir Peter Thomas Blake is an English pop artist. He co-created the sleeve design for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His other works include the covers for two of The Who's albums, the cover of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Live Aid concert poster. Blake also designed the 2012 Brit Award statuette.
Go to Profile#680
Hassan Nasrallah
#680
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Hassan Nasrallah is a Lebanese cleric and the secretary-general of Hezbollah, a Shia Islamist political party and militant group. Born into a Shia family in the suburbs of Beirut in 1960, Nasrallah finished his education in Tyre, when he briefly joined the Amal Movement, and afterwards at a Shia seminary in Baalbek. He later studied and taught at an Amal school. Nasrallah joined Hezbollah after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. After a brief period of religious studies in Iran, Nasrallah returned to Lebanon and became Hezbollah's leader after his predecessor was assassinated by an Israeli...
Go to Profile#681
Maurice Wilkes
#681
Overall Influence
1913 - 2010 (97 years)
Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes was an English computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator , one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits. At the time of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#682
Friedrich L. Bauer
#682
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich. He coined the term Software engineering Life Bauer earned his Abitur in 1942 and served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. From 1946 to 1950, he studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Bauer received his Doctor of Philosophy under the supervision of Fritz Bopp for his thesis Gruppentheoretische Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Spinwellengleichungen in 1952. He completed his habilitation thesis Über q...
Go to Profile#683
Katie Couric
#683
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Katherine Anne Couric is an American journalist and presenter. She is founder of Katie Couric Media, a multimedia news and production company. She also publishes a daily newsletter, Wake Up Call. From 2013 to 2017, she was Yahoo's Global News Anchor. Couric has been a television host at all of the Big Three television networks in the United States, and in her early career she was an assignment editor for CNN. She worked for NBC News from 1989 to 2006, CBS News from 2006 to 2011, and ABC News from 2011 to 2014. In 2021, she appeared as a guest host for the game show Jeopardy!, the first woman ...
Go to Profile#684
Richard Bandler
#684
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Wayne Bandler is an American consultant in the field of self-help. With John Grinder, he founded the neuro-linguistic programming approach to psychotherapy in the 1970s. Education and background Bandler was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and attended high school in Sunnyvale, California. He has stated that he was beaten as a child so badly that every bone in his body was broken. After his parents separated, he moved with his mother and stayed mostly in and around San Francisco. Bandler obtained a BA degree in philosophy and psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 19...
Go to Profile#685
Roméo Dallaire
#685
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Roméo Antonius Dallaire is a Canadian retired politician and military officer who was a senator from Quebec from 2005 to 2014, and a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Armed Forces. He notably was the force commander of UNAMIR, the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping force for Rwanda between 1993 and 1994, and for trying to stop the genocide that was being waged by Hutu extremists against Tutsis. Dallaire is a Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and co-director of the MIGS Will to Intervene Project.
Go to Profile#686
Élisabeth Roudinesco
#686
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Élisabeth Roudinesco is a French scholar, historian and psychoanalyst. She conducts a seminar on the history of psychoanalysis at the École Normale Supérieure. Roudinesco's work focuses mainly on psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis in France, but also worldwide. She has written biographies of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. Her biography of Freud, Freud, In his Time and Ours, was awarded the "Prix Décembre" 2014 and The "Prix des Prix" 2014. With Michel Plon, she published a huge Dictionary of Psychoanalysis , which was translated into many languages, though not yet into English. Her book Généalogies was awarded The Best Book Prize by The Société française d'histoire de la médecine.
Go to Profile#687
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#687
Overall Influence
1919 - 2021 (102 years)
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind , which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".
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Aaron Director
#688
Overall Influence
1901 - 2004 (103 years)
Aaron Director was a Russian-born American economist and academic who played a central role in the development of law and economics and the Chicago school of economics. Director was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and together with his brother-in-law, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, Director influenced some of the next generation of jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
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Arthur Laffer
#689
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Arthur Betz Laffer is an American economist and author who first gained prominence during the Reagan administration as a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board . Laffer is best known for the Laffer curve, an illustration of the theory that there exists some tax rate between 0% and 100% that will result in maximum tax revenue for government. In certain circumstances, this would allow governments to cut taxes, and simultaneously increase revenue and economic growth.
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Chuck Jones
#690
Overall Influence
1912 - 2002 (90 years)
Charles Martin Jones was an American animator, painter, and voice actor, best known for his work with Warner Bros. Cartoons on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of shorts. He wrote, produced, and/or directed many classic animated cartoon shorts starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, Pepé Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, and Porky Pig, among others.
Go to Profile#691
Robert C. Merton
#691
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert Cox Merton is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1997 Merton together with Myron Scholes were awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the method to determine the value of derivatives.
Go to Profile#692
Joseph Rotblat
#692
Overall Influence
1908 - 2005 (97 years)
Sir Joseph Rotblat was a Polish and British physicist. During World War II he worked on Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project, but left the Los Alamos Laboratory on grounds of conscience after it became clear to him in 1944 that Germany had ceased development of an atomic bomb.
Go to Profile#693
Jacob Bekenstein
#693
Overall Influence
1947 - 2015 (68 years)
Jacob David Bekenstein was a Mexican, USA and Israeli theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the foundation of black hole thermodynamics and to other aspects of the connections between information and gravitation.
Go to Profile#694
Steven Chu
#694
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
Go to Profile#695
Ray Solomonoff
#695
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Ray Solomonoff was the inventor of algorithmic probability, his General Theory of Inductive Inference , and was a founder of algorithmic information theory. He was an originator of the branch of artificial intelligence based on machine learning, prediction and probability. He circulated the first report on non-semantic machine learning in 1956.
Go to Profile#696
Huston Smith
#696
Overall Influence
1919 - 2016 (97 years)
Huston Cummings Smith was a scholar of religious studies in the United States, He authored at least thirteen books on world's religions and philosophy, and his book about comparative religion, The World's Religions sold over three million copies as of 2017.
Go to Profile#697
Alister McGrath
#697
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Alister Edgar McGrath is a Northern Irish theologian, Anglican priest, intellectual historian, scientist, Christian apologist, and public intellectual. He currently holds the Andreas Idreos Professorship in Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, and is a fellow of Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford, and is Professor of Divinity at Gresham College. He was previously Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education at King's College London and Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture, Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Oxf...
Go to Profile#698
Francis Collins
#698
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He served as director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents.
Go to Profile#699
Clive James
#699
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Clive James was an Australian critic, journalist, broadcaster, writer and lyricist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1962 until his death in 2019. He began his career specialising in literary criticism before becoming television critic for The Observer in 1972, where he made his name for his wry, deadpan humour.
Go to Profile#700
John Forbes Nash Jr.
#700
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
John Forbes Nash, Jr. , known and published as John Nash, was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, real algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. Nash and fellow game theorists John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten were awarded the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. In 2015, he and Louis Nirenberg were awarded the Abel Prize for their contributions to the field of partial differential equations.
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